Obsidian’s new space RPG offers you interesting and unexpected choices up until the credits roll

The post Damn, <i>The Outer Worlds 2</i>‘s Flaw System Is So Good appeared first on Kotaku.

The Baldur’s Gate 3 studio promises its not using AI to cut corners

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Puzzling Places adds Journey Mode, remastered puzzles, improved hand tracking and more in a free update.

The Realities.io developed VR jigsaw game, known for turning real-world locations into tactile 3D puzzles, is rolling out a large update for the holiday season. Its headline feature is Journey Mode, a new way to play designed to offer a calmer, low-effort experience.

Rather than the game’s normal loop, where the player gets all the pieces of a disassembled puzzle at once, Journey Mode begins with a single central piece and offers only a small set of pieces to add at a time. Players then attach pieces to grow the center, allowing the scene to gradually assemble in an almost guided progression.

Today’s update also overhauls hand tracking, which Realities.io says has been optimized for sharper responsiveness and more intuitive reactions. Updated tutorials have been added, as well as “natural gestures” like poking puzzle pieces to inspect them, dragging them to switch tabs, and a “throw-back” motion to return pieces to their staging area.

Quality of life updates are also promised. These include the addition of a new in-game menu, an updated start screen with quick-start options, personalized stats, and tailored puzzle pack recommendations. Puzzling Places’ library features more legible thumbnails for easier browsing, and puzzle and pack ratings are now visible directly from the storefront.

Lastly, the base game’s lineup of puzzles has been refreshed, swapping out older puzzles for community favorites. Four puzzles have been remastered with new animations and effects as well.

Puzzling Places’ Holiday Update is available now as a free download on Quest, PS VR2, and Pico. The game is also available on Apple Vision Pro, and coming to Steam at a later date.

On Dec. 21, 2025, Ebenezer Scrooge will be haunted for the last time by disembodied spirits wearing Quest 2 or newer headsets.

Thereafter, the first fully embodied telling of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in consumer VR will play on loop around the holiday each year, replaying the spatially captured performance by Agile Lens.

“One of our white whales we finally achieved this holiday was a method for perfectly recording EVERYTHING that happens during a live show,” wrote architect and producer Alex Coulombe over direct message. “Mocap, show cues, audio, even everything the audience does. And we can play it back completely on demand.”

Since 2021, Agile Lens has put together the experimental VR telling of A Christmas Carol using the latest cutting edge capture and streaming technologies, including Unreal’s MetaHuman avatars. The production, along with other Agile Lens projects like a gigantic holodeck selling real estate in Texas, led the group to develop a tool called “Stage Presence” for the creation of future theatre-based productions in VR.

“We have no plans to shut down the app at this time— after the all-day VR replays on Christmas Eve, likely we’ll leave it as a bit of a museum where you can visit Charles Dickens’s study and see our old “Next Show in…” counter,” Coulombe wrote. “Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll find a good reason to bring it out of retirement.”

Tickets are free in Quest 2 or newer VR headsets to the final live showings held from Friday to Sunday. The performance stars Ari Tarr as Dickens and Scrooge with Debbie Deer as the ghosts, both of them wearing Quest Pro headsets for face and body capture. You’ll become a Ghost of Christmas Present during the tellings this weekend, and visible to Scrooge as a disembodied spirit helping him come to terms with his behavior.

“I’m really proud of it. I’m going to miss it a lot. It’s been such a joy and such a useful resource to come back to,” said Kevin Laibson, who worked as a producer on the production. “You really can’t mess up a Christmas Carol – everyone knows it and loves it.”

As A Christmas Carol becomes a production running on repeat like other holiday movies and TV shows, the spirits who appear at the live “taping” in VR this weekend will be joined by ghosts of the present from the future.

“Likely next year we’ll pick a few dates to trigger some shared VR replays,” Coulombe wrote. “The ‘live’ audience will be there as ghosts of the “present” right alongside the audience ghosts of the “past”— it will all get very meta.”

We’re extremely curious to see what Agile Lens and their creators do next with theatre in VR and with their Stage Presence tool. There have been some impressive theatrical experiences like The Under Presents and The Tempest and much more made in VR by others, but nothing that’s been able to keep a troupe of actors employed continuously.

“VR live theatre is wonderful in terms of accessibility, but it’s still far from the ideal of actual breathing people in the same venue gasping and laughing together,” Coulombe wrote. “And so we’d love the chance to combine our mixed reality theatre toolset with our virtual reality theatre toolset for a production that caters to an on-site audience while also inviting participants from around the world to join in. That’s the goal of Stage Presence— a modular toolkit to service a wide range of live XR productions.”

Stealth shooter Espire: MR Missions gets a standalone release in early access, and existing Espire 2 owners get it for free.

Revealed last month, Espire: MR Missions expands upon the mixed reality mode previously seen in Espire 2: Stealth Operatives. This comes with 29 different missions that dynamically adapt to your home, taking out guards and navigating traps between 21 small-scale single-room missions and eight large-scale multi-room missions. That’s out now for the wider Quest platform.

Detailing its reasons for making this a standalone launch, developer Digital Lode advised that it’s “proven very difficult to maintain the MR mode within the larger Espire 2 VR game” as mixed reality technology evolves. The developer also believes that roomscale mixed reality offers a different appeal compared to Espire 2’s fully immersive VR missions.

As such, Espire 2: Stealth Operatives will return to being 100% focused on VR and its existing MR support will eventually be removed. Because of this, anyone who bought Espire 2 on Quest before today’s launch will receive MR Missions for free, while all future Espire 2 owners will get a discounted rate.

As for its latest additions, the early access release of MR Missions comes with five new missions and a new target shooting game mode. Digital Lode advised that its core ‘Espire Spatial Adaptation System’ for adapting levels to your space has seen “tonnes of improvements,” while some mechanics have been simplified. There’s also a new user interface that’s been designed for mixed reality.

Espire: MR Missions is out now in early access on Quest for $8.99. A full release date is unconfirmed, though the studio advised that it’s preparing a roadmap of “new missions, modes, features, and content.”

Fleming will pass the reigns to a new generation of PlayStation studio leadership

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Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s return to the big summer blockbuster genre he helped create with Jaws

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Also: Final Fantasy VII Remake is free-to-try on Switch 2

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AdHoc says no players have gotten a ‘perfect’ run of the superhero management sim

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Zero Caliber is now available on PlayStation VR2.

Originally released in early access in 2018, Zero Caliber by XREAL Games is one of VR’s older FPS hits that have since appeared on most major VR platforms. This comes with a campaign that supports single player and up to four-player co-op, PvP game modes, and a Zombies mode. Having originally targeted a December 12 launch, it’s now arrived on PlayStation VR2 following a brief delay.

We’ve yet to go hands-on with this new edition, so we’re unsure whether this features any PlayStation VR2-specific enhancements at launch. In a social media reply, the studio confirmed that adaptive triggers support would arrive “either in a day-1 or week-1 patch.” We’ve contacted the studio asking for further details, and we’ll update this article if we learn more.

It’s the first time we’ve seen the Zero Caliber series reach PlayStation, and you may recall a port was planned for the original PlayStation VR. The studio later confirmed this was based on the Quest edition, Reloaded, citing “hardware limitations” as to why it couldn’t port the PC VR version. This ultimately never materialized, and today’s release is based on the PC VR edition.

As for what’s next, XREAL Games previously advised it’s planning to bring the sequel, Zero Caliber 2, to Sony’s headset following October’s PC VR remastered launch. However, a specific release window is currently unknown. Elsewhere, the studio released a new Zero Caliber 2 quality of life update on Quest with new weapons, and a Steam update for Remastered is also arriving soon.

Zero Caliber is out now on PlayStation VR2 and PC VR, while Zero Caliber: Reloaded is on Quest and Pico.

This year was filled with big shooters, like Battlefield 6 and Borderlands 4 , and smaller indie titles, like Mohtra and Voidbreaker

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These deals let you save up to 60% on Sam’s Club memberships, but they’re selling out fast.

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Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell team up in the second season, which expands the game world even further

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You’re getting solid sound with a massive 100 hour battery life with this one.

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Half an hour of mercifully cut inane banter has been found and uploaded

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Save 33% on the Beats Pill portable speaker in three different colors: matte black, statement red, and champagne gold.

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The studio’s final project was the ill-fated Redfall before it was shut down in 2024

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Enjoy superior noise cancellation, plus an exceptional battery life.

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The RPG powerhouse promises no genAI in the finished game

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Save as much as 32% on the ACEMAGIC W1 Mini PC (32GB RM, 1TB storage) over at Amazon for a limited time.

The post Amazon Clears Out a Ryzen 7 Mini PC at a Record Low as a Mac Mini Alternative and Windows Backup appeared first on Kotaku.